Know Christ Before You Preach Him to Others
Live your faith fully before you tell others how to live.
As a Catholic priest, I obviously read a lot of material that rejects our teaching. This is not anti-Catholicism, any more than a statement against the US form of democracy could be considered anti-American. It is more material from different secular sources that wish the Catholics would mind their own business, leave them alone and stop forcing their morality on others.
We might read some of these complaints with trepidation because we embrace our morality but many Catholics and other Christians do not understand the sine qua non of Catholicism: A well-fostered prayer life.
Some of you, I assume, expected me to say a well-formed conscience. No, because the conscience gives us the right and wrong, but we need our prayer life to both live right and wrong and to give us the correct motivation.
Any Catholic organization that rejects the idea of a relationship with Jesus as part of living the Catholic life is wrong, period. Therefore, if you know some Catholics that reject this part of our faith and turn you away from it, then reject their teaching. Usually they are rooted in a black and white form of moralism that Cardinal Sarah teaches is the “consequence of unspoken fears.” (Sarah, Cardinal Robert, Diat Nicholas: God or Nothing A Conversation on Faith, 2015, Igatius, San Francisco, P. 156 Kindle Version)
A prayer life in communion with Christ in the Trinity is a central part of our Catholicism. Our faith becomes nasty and even sterile without it. It becomes nothing more than a set of rules.
Remember, Catholicism is not a moral system, it is a relationship with a person: Jesus Christ. Through that relationship we grow in wisdom and love for God and neighbor. It is here that our morality is built, not the other way around. Without relationship, we become symbols of a morality for morality’s stake. We look at Heaven as a carrot on a stick. “If we do the right thing, we will finally meet Christ face to face. Until that time, we just labor harder in the fields waiting on that one day he may greet us.” That approach loses steam and can easily do what many have done — dissolve into self-righteous anger that uses our faith as a weapon.
Experiencing Christ In Silence
If you read my article last week on Cardinal Sarah, you will notice how much I enjoyed his words from his latest book…medium.com
What Christ actually calls us to do is to know him, be in relationship with Him and let that relationship shape all our actions. When that becomes the case our preaching is not Bible-thumping that attacks others for reasons they cannot explain, it is loving that inspires others to seek the one who we know.
This is what it means to be a person of faith.
Many reject our Catholic morals because they do not understand them. They may comprehend the concepts but not the reasoning behind them. This is especially true if they understand that the only reason to embrace the morals is to avoid Hell. This negative motivation turns people off intensely. Usually, it is wrong.
The Catholic Church teaches that those who go to Hell are obstinate sinners who perpetually reject God’s grace of invitation. Others, who do not understand the Catholic message may not embrace our morality because they never saw a reason why. The fear of Hell never swayed them and in fact, it is the poorest reason to seek Christ.
We avoid sin, not because it may lead us to Hell, but because it may lead us away from Heaven and the one we seek to know love and serve Jesus Christ.
Our motivation is to please God, we cannot teach others our morals and expect them to adhere to it, if they do not understand the proper motivation.
I remember hearing the words of a world class runner who refused to ski. His reason was that he did not want to risk a broken leg which would have undermined his running goals. He chose to sacrifice one thing so that he could excel in another.
There is nothing wrong with skiing and many people do it, but if he truly wanted to become what he sought, he chose not to ski.
This is a better understanding of our morality. As we develop a deep communion with Christ we change our behavior so that we grow closer to Him. Therefore, we live Catholic morality because it is a choice we make against anything that will draw us from Christ. Others may not choose Christ so they choose what we would consider immoral. We cannot teach them of Christ if we are not in communion with Him. Our daily experience with Christ must affecting our lives.
The saints did not avoid sin out of fear of Hell, but out of separating themselves from Christ. There is a big difference between those two motivations.
I helped a man our of despair when he stopped to talk to me after he saw me hand money to a homeless person. He saw that as a sign that I had some charity in me. I discovered, through our conversation, he felt that he could not possibly be forgiven for a sin he committed years earlier.
He told me that he bought some kind witchcraft kit that taught him an incantation to use against his boss. The day after he followed the instructions in the kit, his boss died of a heart attack. Although, I believe the whole thing was coincidental, he believed his actions led to the death of his boss and he went into a deep despair that lasted years. He believed that he did something terrible for which he could never be forgiven. He came to learn through our simple conversation that God had not rejected him as he believed. He began to speak to me after he saw me put my faith into action.
Dr. Peter Kreeft, John’s Gospel and Writing
Boston College philosophy professor Dr. Peter Kreeft is a prolific writer. He uses his Socratic writing skills to teach…medium.com
I was not thumping a Bible, I was not condemning evil sinners. I was not even in religious life by the way. I was trying to live my faith and that opened a door he needed opening.
You can read countless words of people who will rail against the actions of Catholics and other Christians against them. Those words are really them saying to us: “Do not speak to us of your God until you show us your God through your lives.” Otherwise, our God to them looks like the holographic form of the Wizard of Oz. No one wants a relationship with him.
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